Anyone who lived within a 200 mile radius of Chicago while growing up would know that moving the Chicago mob to Washington, D.C., and the White House would “fundamentally transform” us into a Nazi-like hell hole where the strong (politically connected) take what they want and destroy all opposition. It is a hallmark of such people that they use the resources of the entities they have corrupted to do their bidding.

Calls by outraged citizens for “resignations” make me want to puke. Are those peddling these calls really so stupid they don’t realize such fired Nazis simply go on to a Soros-funded leftist stink-tank, where they bide their time until another mobster employs them elsewhere? Or they become union thugs paid by the state or school district to plot the next election victory, rather than do the job they were hired to perform. That is “public service” today.

John Boehner got one thing right in a recent interview. He said he wasn’t so much interested in who is getting fired. He wants to know who is going to prison.

Crimes of political intimidation, whether committed by the president of the United States or a union flunkie simply trying at taxpayer expense to re-elect that president, have to be met with disproportional force, lest the host organism die.

The IRS issues are even worse. Intimidation under color of authority is a serious offense under almost all jurisdictions. It is almost never prosecuted, because government hates prosecuting government. This kind of thing (Nuremberg, only following orders, kill how many Jews today, sir?) only stops when low-level flunkies calculate the chance of 10 years in prison is more likely than a promotion and the boss’ gratitude.

Anyone who thinks giving the low-level flunkies immunity for testifying against their bosses will cure this is delusional. You’ve just confirmed the flunkies’ mindset: I did it and I got off anyway!

No. The low-level flunky needs to rot in prison. When his fellow flunkies see this, it will make a walk to the inspector general’s office much easier than compliance with bad direction.

Do I think this will happen? I have no idea. Washington has been a culture of corruption for many years now. Each of us gets all the representation we pay for with campaign contributions. The mob in D.C. was just more patrician and less brazen than the rival Chicago branch. The self-imagined elites feel entitled to some payback for all their “service” to the nation. Chicago wants every last drop of blood from everyone.

Make no mistake, America. The mob has its foot on your throat. The 2012 election was a raft of Chicago excrement, spread over the entire country and oozing out of its institutions. Mitt Romney needs to have a talk with the ghost of his father some evening over a few too many alcoholic beverages and a good Cuban cigar. Then he needs to call a press conference and demand a new election. Let’s see if Obama’s 32 percent majority elects him a third time. Paging Jimmy Carter, election monitors please come to the head of the voting line. Paging President Carter.

I suspect many readers ask themselves that same question, some on a daily basis. Yet the sad fact is, the majority of us are complicit in America’s fall from grace. Nothing reveals this more than the Kermit Gosnell murder trial. I won’t go into details, because most of us are incapable of comprehending the depravity revealed in that open court testimony.

Morally and ethically, the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to force states to legalize abortion are as guilty as the abortion clinics that have murdered 65 million innocents since Roe v Wade. Out of thin air, a “right” was discovered in the nation’s founding documents guaranteeing that half the population could relieve itself of the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, at the cost of another human being’s life.

In place of 65 million babies that would have been, the abortion industry sprang to life. Doctors, who had sworn an oath to “do no harm” suddenly found abortion a lucrative career. Like most industries “serving” the poor, it soon demanded public subsidy for its “good works.”

Enterprising politicians took this campaign blood money, blessed it at the altar of their ambitions and offered the increase that the abortion industry sought. In so doing, they slaughtered the right to conscience for American taxpayers who recognized abortion as the abomination that it was: the willful murder of innocents by that one person God most intended to protect them.

Having succeeded in destroying the conscience of this nation, those same politicians set their sights on the rest of the world. American taxpayers subsidized this, too. We exported our brutality worldwide.

Be part of the national day of prayer and fasting on 9/11/2013

Curiously silent were America’s Christian churches. Beyond offering sermons or homilies on an annual right-to-life Sunday, and lighting a candle for the endless list of victims, they chose to worship as the alter of 501(c)3 IRS tax deductible contributions. Christians who did exercise their freedom of speech against abortion were marginalized by the media-wing of the abortion industry and prosecuted by the government.

The debate fell silent. Only God cared.

Welcome to the endgame, America. Judgment has arrived. We will take the world’s illegal immigrants, on the off-chance they may someday pay taxes. Obamacare death panels will soon set up shop in America’s nursing homes. “Yes, we know you were promised Medicare, but there is no money. We aborted those children. No taxpayers, no money. No money, no treatment. Sorry. Next!”

As Lincoln said of the raging civil war during his second inaugural address: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

It’s a short address. Read it all. Then weep for what was once America.

Instinctual: “Prompted by natural instinct or propensity. Antonym: Reasoned.”

The area we call home has a lot of both domestic animals and wildlife. As I grow older, more of my time is spent observing these animals, whether cattle in the fields or a fawn in our front yard. Wild or domestic, God seems to have given all these creatures the knowledge they need to be successful in their world, including raising their young.

My friends and neighbors, and sometimes myself, not so much. We seem to be influenced by an endless series of fads. These typically originate in universities or think tanks, and are later spread via infomercials or webinars. With the demise of science, due to its inbreeding with politics, these theories have become ever-more distanced from anything that works in the real world.

The real world is filled with physical laws, which can’t be broken if one wishes to avoid oblivion. It is also increasingly filled with man’s laws, which, unfortunately, must at times be broken to avoid transgressing a physical law and entering instant oblivion.

For instance, two vehicles that attempt to occupy the same space at the same time are going to have a collision. Man’s law says you must remain in your own lane. If I can safely swerve out of my own lane to avoid a collision, I will take my chances with the eventual enforcement of man’s law.

Why would I do that? Because I know that the enforcement of nature’s laws is 1) absolutely certain and 2) unfailingly harsh. It speaks poorly of our age and culture that such a choice must increasingly be made by individuals who wish to survive a collision with nature’s physical laws.

Those cows in the field across the way may not “know” that their jaunt with the handsome bull on the other side of the fence will result in a calf being born in due course. But once the calf comes, mom knows what it takes to protect and nurture that calf until it is big and strong enough to be on its own. And when the time comes, that calf will know the same things. God gave them the knowledge they need to be successful in the physical world they inhabit. You don’t see cows intentionally killing their newborns.

Our opening quote described insanity from a 1990-era word processor thesaurus. The key is “impaired capacity to function safely.” Public health departments once had an obligation to track down the sexual partners of people they treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Duh. Those people needed to be treated, too, so the disease wouldn’t spread across the population.

Then along came AIDS. Once it was learned this disease affected primarily homosexual men, health department behavior changed. Man, in the form of his lawmaking bodies, passed laws making it illegal to track down partners for treatment. The men and women who passed these laws obviously believed that man’s law could trump “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

As the AIDS epidemic spread, the cost of treating AIDS patients fell disproportionately on taxpayers through Medicaid (welfare) treatments. According to the CDC, the lifetime cost of treating an AIDS patient in 2010 dollars was $379,668. According to Avert, in America 1.2 million people have been diagnosed with AIDS. So the cost of treating just these patients during their disease (in 2010 dollars) is $455,625,600,000. But that number is growing at about 50,000 new cases per year, or $18,984,400,000 (in 2010 dollars). And these stats are just America, not the world.

Pursuing this no-tracking policy was insanity. The cost crippled America’s health-care system. Is Obamacare merely a belated recognition of such – and an attempt to hide their blunder – by man’s lawmakers?

These same people, having given us “no fault divorce,” now tell us that marriage must be redefined to whatever the fad of the moment might be. The natural laws of raising children say otherwise.

In the face of global cooling, man’s lawmakers insist that we need a carbon tax to reverse global warming. In response to the actions of willful criminals and the individually insane, lawmakers tell us we need to give up private ownership of firearms. Even the American Navy has gone on record as saying that global warming is the biggest threat they now face.

These (and many others) are the voices of instinctual insanity. In every case their advice will result in violation of physical laws, which will inflict either immediate or long-term, irreversible damage, or complete destruction to society and humanity. No culture in which this disease has spread to its elites has ever survived.

Now it turns out that any legitimacy issues George W. Bush had with a Supreme Court-awarded first term due to Florida voting irregularities were, shall we say, niggling. Especially since the Democrats’ answer to Bush, Barack the Righteous, never had enough petition signatures to appear on the 2008 election ballot in Indiana. But he did, anyway.

So how did Obama get there? Fraud, now proven in a court of law, with Democrat election officials headed to jail. Democratic election workers and government officials simply manufactured the petition signatures needed to put both Obama and Hillary on the ballot. Does this mean Barry the Righteous will resign to preserve his honor and spare the nation the turmoil, as Richard Nixon did?

Gitmo still seems to be operating. A major hunger strike among inmates is under way. But now that a Democrat is in the White House, it’s no longer an issue, is it? Let them eat cake.

Spying on American citizens? The NSA is building the largest data center in the world in Utah, capable of recording and saving your conversations, faxes, emails and idiot web forum comments, long after you are dead and gone. Those recordings could even assist in your early demise at the hands of the government, should they not like what they hear. The Fourth Amendment prohibits such spying. But it is a toss-up whether Democrats care less about the Constitution or their oath of office, which requires that the laws be faithfully executed. All they want to execute are Republicans, Christians and constitutionalists.

Medical insurance? Our premiums went up 20 percent last year and another 20 percent this year. And this is a small-business policy, rated on a statewide pool of workers. The insurance exchanges? Well, they’re not quite ready. By a long shot.

Drone attacks? The FAA has been ordered to find room in the national airspace for 20,000 drones to be flying in America by 2020. There have already been serious drone incursions into flight paths reported by airline pilots. I guess when you’re a video-game pilot behind the big screen – instead of up in the air – that’s no big deal, for you.

Sen. Rand Paul, who drew a line in the sand on the Senate floor against drone strikes on American citizens, has now rethought the issue. He sees no problem with a drone firing on a guy robbing a liquor store. Yeah, sure; blow up the whole block. Who would have thought that liquor stores were part of the national security network?

And the lies and deceit? Well, it hasn’t stopped since the fraudulent election petitions filed to put Barack the Righteous on the Indiana ballot, has it? Everything he said during the campaign was a lie, with the possible exception of fundamentally transforming America into a bankrupt state at war with itself.

Yup. Barack Obama looks an awfully lot like George W. Bush, but without any of the appealing bits that graced Bush’s presidency. And you know what? Democrats couldn’t have done it without the media. And this weekend they will celebrate with the White House Correspondents Dinner located in … Washington, D.C. That is, after all, the only city in America Democrats care about.

Astute workforce participants quickly learn that when a poorly planned project is introduced into the company and something bad happens as a result, events occur in this order:

1. Wild enthusiasm (for all the benefits the new project will bring)
2. Dejected disillusionment (once it proves impossible to implement)
3. Hunt for the guilty
4. Punishment of the innocent
5. Promotion of the non-participants

Liberalism, more correctly known by its holy grail “utopianism,” is the largest “human trials” experiment ever conducted in history. (Somewhere, there must be a record of it having received FDA approval.) These human trials continue today, even though the experiment entered failure mode in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down.

With the failure of “Soviet-topia,” communism’s mouthpieces in the media and on American campuses entered “Baghdad Bob” mode. Reading their teleprompters over the video backdrop of European Union states falling like socialist dominos, the mouthpieces offered excuses and outright denials about what was happening in their promised land, as it was broadcast live on the backdrop behind them.

On 9/11, America entered Phase 3 of the world’s largest failed project: Hunt for the guilty. As I recall, all but one of the 9/11 hijackers held Saudi passports. America promptly declared an undeclared war on Iraq and somewhat later, added Afghanistan. While American air traffic was grounded for security reasons, a planeload of high-ranking Saudis flew home courtesy of the Bush administration.

Phase 4, punishment of the innocent, began immediately after 9/11. American liberties, won at great expense during the war for independence, were discarded or swept under the congressional, presidential and judicial rugs, where they were covered with the Constitution, just for good measure.

A new bureaucracy was created from what had previously provided border security. This new police force was greatly expanded and moved inside the nation’s airports. Americans soon found the long arm of the law inserted well up inside their body cavities, searching for such prohibited items as shampoo bottles and breast milk. Federal courts agreed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply within 100 miles of the borders (until just recently in the Ninth Circuit).

Phase 3, hunt for the guilty, was transitioned into identification of anyone who disagreed with the government’s approach to Phase 4, punishing the innocent. Soon returning war veterans, the few outspoken commentators who actually existed, constitutionalists and, yes, fundamentalist Christians were added to the list of potential terrorists. Muslims, curiously (since the 9/11 terrorists had all cited Islamic religious reasons for their attacks), were not.

With the election of Barack Obama, a man with no public history (carefully guarded at great legal expense), three known Social Security numbers, a surrendered Illinois law license and no previous involvement in America’s great terrorist adventure (other than perhaps being a closet Muslim), America entered Phase 5, promotion of the non-participants.

Oddly enough, the failed human-trials experiment in liberal utopianism continues. This would seem to contradict the FDA’s guidance that once a human-trials experiment proves ineffective or harmful to the control group, ethics demand that the experiment be stopped or the control group be provided with the remedy. Perhaps that is because poverty, while not curable, is an incurably good source of votes for demagogues who find their calling in government.

A few of you may still recall an account in an obscure book called the New Testament, where a legalist named Saul had developed quite a name for himself by torturing and terminating Jews who had converted to a fashionable new faith called Christianity.

Saul was at this particular time traveling the road to Damascus with his entourage, where he had hot new leads on practicing Christians. In the midst of his travels, he experienced a light that blinded him and found his face pushed down into the dirt of the road. With Jesus Christ’s foot on his neck, the man Saul, who would become the apostle Paul, was presented with a question. Roughly translated for today’s audience, it was: “Saul, you’re really pi–ing me off. Why are you doing it?”

His face still in the dirt and Jesus Christ’s foot still on his neck, Saul responded, quite wisely, “Lord, who are you?”

The self-imagined elites in America, of course, are much better educated than Saul, who was at that very moment becoming the apostle Paul. Saul was only one of the best educated legal minds of ancient Israel. As such, the first question he wanted answered was, “Just who am I dealing with here?”

As Jesus Christ drags America’s self-imagined elites off their high-horses and pushes their faces down into the dirt, I’m sure they will have a much better answer to the Lord’s simple question for America than Saul was able to offer.

The policies of the elites have produced the climate in which America now finds itself. Our “elites” are much like the horse I had many years ago. I would muck out the stall, put in fresh straw and hang up a full hay net for dinner. Upon re-entering the stall, the horse’s first action was to pee in the corner. That’s America’s leadership today.

Perhaps that is because in America, bad things must always be someone’s – or something’s – fault. The Jews called that idea a scapegoat. In ancient Israel, a goat was let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur, after the high priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head. The rules are found in Leviticus, should you want to improve your scapegoating.

Dictionary.com offers us a more modern definition: “A person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.” And I would add that this being America, “they” – or “it” – must be made to pay.

With both the killer and his mother dead, the search for a scapegoat fell into the hands of the people I wrote about in this column. Washington, D.C.’s collection of demagogues and hypocrites had no trouble in finding an appropriate scapegoat: an inanimate object that carried all their public failures into the wilderness, and at the same time would promote their quest for absolute power.

Yes, the answer was obvious: The murders were carried out by a firearm. Therefore, firearms – and their owners – must be made to pay! Don’t trouble us with no “stink’in facts, man! We don’t wanna know!”

Too bad. Evil exists. And good people make bad decisions. Yes, even here in Ameritopia, where the killer’s mother “had found her son falling deeper into a bizarre mindset, the newspaper reports, and in November, only two weeks before the shootings, found sketches of dead bodies in his room.

“One (drawing) had a woman clutching a religious item, like rosary beads, and holding a child, and she was getting all shot up in the back with blood flying everywhere,” an unidentified friend told the Daily News.

“Nancy was disturbed, really disturbed, but didn’t confront him,” the friend said. “She wanted to think it over.”

Yeah, she wanted to think it over. Would that be as in some cases it might be just fine for your 20-year-old, previously diagnosed, mentally ill son living at home with you to be drawing pictures of murdering mothers and babies?

The Sandy Hook parents and others running around this nation at taxpayer and DNC front group expense seeking to hold responsible an inanimate object for their grief are, quite frankly, a disgrace. They know perfectly well the truth about Sandy Hook, but they are lying to America. They would have us “sacrifice essential liberty,” to paraphrase Ben Franklin, not for temporary safety, but for their own momentary convenience.

And the truth is very inconvenient. Adam Lanza’s mother knew that her son was a danger. But she blamed “bullying” at the school (not, you will note, the individual bullies, just the process). She excused and enabled her son’s actions. She knew the course her son’s illness would take, yet she did nothing. And neither did anyone else in her circle of friends. She enabled her son.

Just as the Sandy Hook parents and others who have suffered a personal loss are enabling the sick hypocrites and demagogues in D.C. who are shamefully using these family members’ grief to destroy essential American liberties. Why? Because they find individual liberty and freedom from government overreach inconvenient to their hypocritical lives and careers. Stop dishonoring the memory of your loved ones. Stop dishonoring America. Tell the truth.

Yet they govern in an entirely different manner. And during media interviews, they advocate for the most popular and yet socially destructive pathologies, insisting that everyone had a right to “do their own thing.” This garners them money and power from those groups and individuals pushing these pathologies for their own immediate gratification – gratification that is pursued amid the wreckage and ruin of millions upon millions of human lives by those who follow their trendy rhetoric.

When the elites attempt to fix the problems brought about by their hypocritical lives (advocating perversity in public but pursuing purity in private), we find ourselves as a nation adrift in a sea of single mothers on welfare, children who have no idea who their fathers are (bastards who look to gangs for that function) and a flood of welfare-dependent illegal immigrants eager to bring their family members to the promised land.

We find, by any results-orientated measure, one of the most failed and broken educational establishments in the world. Here the inmates run the institution in terms of discipline, and the teachers’ unions set the promotional, pay and benefit scales with the help of local and state wannabe D.C. elites, who lead the same hypocritical lives. Standards are lowered until none exist, in an attempt to “make the numbers look good.” (What a hell it must be for the few still trying.) All so the elites and elite wannabes can retain power and make life better for themselves.

The growing underclass (uneducated and unemployable) are allowed to prey on the elderly and helpless, buy and sell drugs, steal from stores and individuals, on condition that they don’t inconvenience the lives of the elites. An ever-expanding prison population keeps the violence at a socially acceptable level.

All of which brings us to guns. The elites employ guns, either themselves or in the person of bodyguards or police to protect their own persons and property. But – and no surprise here – they hypocritically seek to dissuade other far more vulnerable citizens from using guns to do the same – the very citizens living in the sea of failed social policies that have spawned the sick, sociopathic society we now inhabit. Look at the Chicago murder statistics if you disagree.

So the real problem with the elites is not stupidity (although inherited money isolates one from how the world really works). The real problem is their addiction to hypocrisy. And cowardliness. They know what works, they live their lives based on it, and yet they deny the solution to a broken nation.

Through their media mouthpieces, the elites blare support for all manner of perversities in the marketplace, provided a vote or campaign contribution can be had in return. They expressly ignore the predictable outcome of those perversities on the most vulnerable, only a few of which were mentioned earlier.

Gun control would make the elites’ lives so much easier. They could govern completely without the consent of the governed; not just to the limits of the media mafia’s bullhorn, as they do today. The day that happens, America can look forward to whatever few remaining parts of society that still function passably well being bulldozed to the ground in a new “stimulus” program.

Does anyone still believe that the nation is reclaimable from the treason of its own leaders?

Perhaps you are Jewish: “Happy spring break!” Well … uh, thank you.

Perhaps you are Muslim: “Happy spring break!” Yes, thank you so much!

Perhaps you are Hindu: “Happy spring break!” Yes, thank you. I will meditate upon that.

Perhaps you are Christian: “Happy spring break!” Why thank you! Jesus loves you!

“You religious bigot! Get the hell out of our country!”

Spring break is a secular masterpiece. (They’re still working on Christmas.) Spring break can be used to celebrate anything you want (well, except perhaps summer, fall, winter or Easter). Most often, however, spring break is an excuse to get parents to pay for travel for their college-age children to a hedonistic hotspot, where they can sample the latest drug and alcohol cocktails while picking up a sexually transmitted disease or two. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for paying for our education.

Well, boys and especially girls, that STD may be the most relevant part of your education these days. In college (and increasingly on downward into early grade school), you’ve been fed a garbage truck-sized load of social engineering by political zealots and labor union activists. These people are creatures of the taxpayer dollar, and they become more contemptuous of the source with each dollar they collect.

When your parents graduated from college, there were employers holding job fairs. As a nation, we actually made things. Today, you may pay for your own internship, and the government staffs booths to help graduates get welfare, disability or unemployment.

Increasingly, your expectation to collect a diploma and return home to live with Mom and Dad until you are 27 years old is viewed as realistic by the culture around you. (I think that is the time when you can’t be on your parent’s insurance anymore. Perhaps by then they’ve also paid down some of your student loans.)

At least from the STD, you learned that actions have consequences. Here are a few of the ones that are not quite so direct or immediate:

Your life will not be nearly as comfortable as that of your parents. The government in your state capitol and Washington, D.C., that your union proselytizers bowed down to and worshiped for more benefits is dead broke. Together, state and federal governments have already distributed your benefits and your children’s benefits to your parents’ generation. And that is before your parents get old and doddering and have to be taken care of by the state.

That dollar in your pocket (you do still get an allowance, right) today will be worth about 10 cents by the time you finally find a job and are into your career. (You are the ones who will get to pay back all those bonds that the Federal Reserve is creating out of thin electrons today.) Whoever controls the government at that time will tell you this is great news! You are getting paid way more than your parents were. What they won’t tell you that it’s even better news for them: Now you’re rich and can pay lots of taxes.

Of course things cost way more, too. Your friends just got a fixer-upper house in a run-down part of town for an even $1 million. Thanks to a 50-year mortgage, it is affordable, too. And the bank just loves them to death with that adjustable rate mortgage.

Perhaps if you can stay home long enough, you can simply take over your parent’s house? After all, they will need someone to care for them. And that modest little house they had is now worth nearly $5 million! Who would have thought?! We will never have to work again!

What do you mean inheritance taxes? We have to sell the house to pay the taxes? Where are we gonna live? Apply for welfare?

Happy spring break! Think of it as a time to celebrate the abolition of all the terrible things that Christianity did for America. Gone is the work ethic, moral restraint and the prohibition that the rich and powerful take care not to prey upon the weak and poor. Religious instruction and personal restraint enabled personal freedom and restrained government. Twenty-thousand drones in the sky will never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And always remember what you learned in school: All roads lead to where you are now. All except one. All except the cross. Something is telling me that it is too late for America. But it is not too late for you. Soon, however, it will be.

In reality, all roads lead to the cross. And from there, to God’s unfathomable love, or his terrible and eternal judgment. Happy Easter. You still have a choice.

Besides, the year-2000 computer disaster came and went with no one the wiser. I remember sitting in front of my computer screen as the decade rolled over. If the Internet knew about a problem, it never let on – 1999 gave way seamlessly to the year 2000. (Would that the intervening years had been so kind.)

In a sense, however, the year-2000 disaster was averted: A lot of programmers made a lot of money rewriting old software to change the date calculations and update the year to four digits. People knew there was a problem. They set out to fix it. Utility software, banking software and so on was rewritten.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the America of 1999. And most of us don’t know there is a potential problem. Major media outlets no longer give even lip service to news reporting. In the few instances where they try, they are more often wrong than right with their facts, let alone their conclusions. Their job now seems to be shouting “hosanna” and laying down the red carpet for their earthly messiah and his glorious revolution of hope and change.

Today, about every other child born enters life in a two-parent household. We’ve known for decades that children without fathers grow up to be angry, alienated men and aimless, welfare-dependent women who repeat the cycle. The state and federal government have funded it all: stealing the money from two-parent households through higher taxes to do the job.

To control crime, the police are increasingly militarized. This alienates decent citizens who have occasional encounters with them, or read about raids on the wrong house, shooting the family pet and so on.

Public school systems graduate the functionally illiterate, who turn out that way mainly because they don’t attend class or study. Why should they? The gang they belong to is their family and teaches them all they need to know to survive in the city. It’s just that the rest of us might not like what they’ve learned.

Here’s a question: How much food does your family have on hand? I recently read that the average family has a three-day supply. And that is if the refrigerator keeps working. How long did it take for the grocery store shelves to go bare during Katrina? Do you keep some bottled water on hand like the Red Cross advises? I know I don’t. It just seems like it could never happen here.

How much gasoline is in your automobile tank? Do you have an alternative source of heat for your home if the electricity or natural gas goes down? Any way to communicate if your high-speed Internet and cell phone service go down? Maybe you never became attached to those gadgets and have a landline? What happens if you dial 911 and get a busy signal or no one answers?

Do you know your neighbors? Are they going to help you get a family member to the hospital in an emergency? Are all your “friends” on Facebook, scattered across the country?

We’re prone to think of disasters as weather or earthquake related. But is there anything else that could do it? How about a data-center disaster or programming problem at a major bank? You visit the ATM or run your debit card at the grocery store, and your balance is zero.

Now what? Do you call your friends to find out if any of them have had that problem? Post on Facebook? How long before there is a run on the bank and violence in the branches when people can’t get their money? Do you have any cash stashed away to buy food before the shelves are empty?

The veneer of civilization is much thinner than most of us suspect. Given the current fondness for electronic gadgetry and the personal isolation it provides, civilization’s veneer may peel off more quickly than we can imagine. Check that refrigerator. How’s it looking in there?

Protect your family by preparing for any and all contingencies – order “The Ultimate Storm Survival Handbook”

You saw one such event this week in the U.S. Senate. Rand Paul spoke to the point of exhaustion on the Senate floor against the administration’s murderous groundwork to target Americans, in America, with drone strikes.

Taken by itself, this event would have been a footnote in the chronicle of Americans’ descent into servitude. But events seldom occur in isolation. And some events, when paired with others around them, burn an indelible impression into the public mind.

And so it is with Sen. Paul’s filibuster. Taken by itself, a well-meaning event, or a bit of grandstanding – depending upon your view.

But taken in context with another event also widely reported, Sen. Paul’s filibuster has historical coattails. At the time one man stood and spoke against tyranny, a dozen of the Republican “old bulls” met for dinner at a fancy Washington hotel with the architect of that tyranny.

These men have now identified themselves as what they really are. The “old bulls” are all about preserving their own power, prestige and plunder, which they have traded for the erosion of Americans’ political freedoms and economic liberty.

Washington, D.C., is now the wealthiest city in the nation. Is anyone surprised? The “old bulls” have been horse-trading our liberties and economic prospects for so long that they have mistaken patronage as their right enshrined in the Constitution. And they are prepared to “rain fire from heaven” with drone strikes to preserve and protect this plunder.

But instead of the treason taking place in America by its own leaders on a daily basis, let us focus instead on lengthening Sen. Paul’s coattails and likewise the coattails of those on the Senate floor who gave him a drink of cool water when he thirsted.

Proposals to fix America’s problems (all of which have been brought about by the ruling class, mind you) are a dime-a-dozen. And they are worth every penny paid for them. They will never be implemented without true transparency shined upon the currency of the old bulls in government.

Big Media long ago extinguished the lamp of truth in their reporting, pledging allegiance instead to provide “propaganda to the people.” While the Republicans and Democrats may at times hate each other, they hate our liberties and freedom more. Look for no help from either in securing your future. Money and power have blinded both parties to their obligations of office.

What then? Transparency, still. And the rising political parties can provide it. They are filled with young people whose futures will be taxed from them in an attempt to preserve the old bulls’ patronage machine: the corporations and the poverty pimps who together have made war and welfare their path to prosperity and power – all paid for by us.

The coming mid-term election could be unlike any other. Computer-savvy young people can produce a mouse-over graphic that enlightens the dark and unreported tentacles of power and patronage now sucking America’s future from our children’s grasp. The New Media are young, but not untested. Their loose yet growing networks and budding investigative skills are up to the task. Taken together, these two new estates offer the best hope for a peaceful transition of power out of the hands of the old bulls. Power to the productive, if you will.

The old bulls’ behavior leads one to believe that the light of transparency is their darkest nightmare. All Americans should work hard to help make the old bulls’ last dream come true.